Chapter One
Postcolonialism Hermeneutical Journey through a Contentious Discourse
Too much theory and not enough literature. What do I know about "terror" and the "colonial encounter"?
I came to theory because I was hurting ... Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.
The British government's Home Office has recently produced a booklet Life in the United Kingdom – a booklet which is essential reading for those who wish to apply for British citizenship. Let me quote a passage from the booklet to illustrate how the prospective candidates are informed about the British empire:
However for many indigenous peoples in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere, the British Empire often brought more regular, acceptable and impartial systems of law and order than many had experienced under their own rulers, or under alien rulers other than European. The spread of the English language helped unite disparate tribal areas that gradually came to see themselves as nations. Public health, peace and access to education, can mean more to ordinary people than precisely who are their rulers.
What this supposedly peaceful and progressive colonial history fails to disclose to the soon-to-be British citizens is the other face of imperialism – the atrocities committed by the empire. Apart from calling the Atlantic slave trade an "evil," the Home Office's version of colonial history is silent about the unsavory aspects of the empire.
There are four tyrannical "isms" which have played a dominant role in recent history: fascism, communism, racism, and colonialism. In the vanquisher's version of history, two of these "isms" – fascism and communism – are projected as heinous crimes. Since it was the West which had a major role in bringing down the cruel regimes and ending the atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, fascism and communism are seen as inhuman and unparalleled in human history. To this, the crimes of other despots – China's Mao, Cambodia's Pol Pot, North Korea's Kim Il-sung, and Ethiopia's Mengistu – are also added. But when it comes to colonialism, there is a willful amnesia and a moral blindness. For most of the last century, many countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean were under the governance of Western nations which never fail to remind others of their proud liberal and democratic credentials. But the atrocities of colonialism are not given equal attention to those of Nazism and communism. There are works on Nazism which record the evil committed by those who pursued this ideology. Then there is the highly acclaimed Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by a group of European academics which tries to catalogue the murders, tortures, extrajudicial killings, deportations, and artificial famines faced by those under communist rule. The report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission deals with the question of apartheid in South Africa. There has, however, been no similar comprehensive documentation or condemnation of the colonial record except for sporadic disapproval of slavery. The question which the late Edward Said posed is still a valid one: "We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what colonialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?"
To revert to the Home Office's booklet, this citizenship exam is likely to be taken not only by those who were part of the former British colonies but also by those who were affected by British imperial adventures in China, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. The booklet maintains a total silence about the British imperial buccaneering in these regions: the Opium Wars caused by the British attempt to force the drug on China; the three Afghan Wars where the British were trying to impose their authority and will; the British occupation of Mesopotamia (Iraq) from 1918 to 1958 and the brutal suppression of several national uprisings; and the violent restraint of the Dervish uprising in Somalia. In the colonies themselves, in Kenya for example, the Mau Mau uprising resulted in thousands of detainees dying as a result of starvation, torture, exhaustion, and disease in the "British gulags" organized well before Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Then there are examples of the British gassing the Kurds, and the massacre of the Malaysian communists by the Scots Guards. Besides these political atrocities, there were disasters created entirely by willful political and commercial decisions. For example, millions died in the famine in India between 1876 and 1908, which Mike Davis calls a "Victorian holocaust" – a misfortune caused not by the weather but by a mixture of British insensitivity and free-market ideology. These misdeeds were not exclusive to the British empire. In the early 1900s, nearly 10 million Congolese died because of the forced labor and mass murder by the Belgian government, while during the 1960s, when Algerians fought for their independence, nearly a million of them died at the hands of French forces.
The Home Office's booklet and current commentators, politicians, historians, and theologians talk about the benefits that came in the wake of modern colonialism, such as the railways, the rule of law, and education. But they conveniently forget the tyranny, torture, poverty, desolation of lands, and destruction of cultures that accompanied the empire. If you look at places like Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Palestine, and Sri Lanka, where conflict is raging, a close scrutiny will reveal that the cause of the conflicts goes back to colonial administrative mismanagement and policies. These are stains on the seductive story of the British empire's civilizing mission which its sympathizers would prefer to overlook. The current advocates of humanitarian intervention conveniently write out these colonial atrocities.
Also omitted from the Home Office's booklet are any references to the "native" resistance to the empire except for a brief passing comment about the growth of "liberation or self-government movements" in India in the 1930s. The booklet also notes that the British did not try to impose Christianity on India, which prompts the comment that "the English tolerance of different national cultures in the United Kingdom itself may have influenced the character of their imperial rule in India."
The litany of British imperial misdemeanors is recalled not to apportion blame or to induce guilt feelings, but as a reminder that along with all well-meaning measures like health, education, transport, law and order, and parliamentary democracy, there were also brutality and intolerance. The purpose of this rehearsal is not to impose and judge an earlier generation by contemporary values but to recognize that the past is problematic and that it cannot be reduced to one tidy version. To phrase it differently, the empire is not a straightforward story of success, as the apologists want to portray it, but a complicated ensemble of atrocity and generosity.
I started with the Home Office document to demonstrate how totalizing forms of knowledge production are at work, and the need for a critical revision. Postcolonial criticism offers such a rereading. Its utility lies in its ability to question both the idea of colonialism as a structure of economic exploitation and profit, and the idea of colonialism as a structure of systematic gathering of reliable knowledge about the colonized.
Postcolonialism: A Compendious History
This book is mainly aimed at readers who are interested in postcolonial biblical criticism. Before we look at that, a brief note about the status of postcolonialism as a field of inquiry. Its arrival, its historical reach (where does colonialism start? Columbus's voyage?), its geographical scope (should one include settler colonies like Australia?), and the range of responses varying from antagonism to appreciation that the term "postcolonial" has invoked, have been competently documented in various anthologies and therefore there is no need for me to repeat them here. What I propose to do in the rest of the chapter is to recall some key events and issues related to postcolonialism which have relevance to biblical studies. Postcolonial critical approaches first made their mark in the humanities, especially in English literature departments in the 1980s and mainly on British and American campuses, and made an impact which was contentious, to say the least. Postcolonial theory developed from a variety of sources, critical traditions, and historical experiences such as anti-colonial resistance writings, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism.
It is worth remembering that postcolonialism did not begin its career in the academy. Before postcolonialism became a potent scholarly discourse in the Western academies, there was a variety of anti-colonial practices which were later incorporated into the discourse as connected to and consonant with what is now known as postcolonial criticism. It had a lengthy, heterogeneous, and complicated history before it made its mark nearly two decades after the end of formal colonialism. The critique of colonialism was initiated by two sets of people – activists and creative writers – who participated in anti-colonial struggles and reflected on them. The current theory owes an intellectual debt to theorist-activists, such as Frantz Fanon, Aim Csaire, Albert Memmi, and C.L.R. James, whose resistant writings and strategies were energized by colonial racism and Marxist thinking. Novelists like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o in their writings explored colonial prejudices concerning African peoples and the cultural havoc caused by the introduction of Christianity to the continent. To this initial list of novelists, which was confined to Commonwealth countries under British control, other theoreticians and creative people were added when postcolonialism was expanded to include the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, and the current superpower, the USA. Robert Young, in his near-encyclopedic history of postcolonialism, has found historical and theoretical significance in Irish, Algerian, negritude, and pan-African liberation movements which were absent in the earlier literature.
The text which is often credited with the inauguration of postcolonialism is Edward Said's Orientalism. This book produced a cluster of disciplinary approaches, and among them were postcolonialism and colonial discourse analysis. It is worth remembering that Edward Said, in his lifelong pursuit of the study of literature, rarely used postcolonialism as a mode of inquiry. In an interview he called it a "misnomer." Abstract theories did not enthuse him. In the same interview, he said that he "was always trying to gear [his] writing not towards a theoretical constituency but towards a political." For a systematic analysis, his preferred term was "secular criticism." What he was dismissive of was the vacuous and notably tedious and at times unreadable stuff which passed for high theory and not the sort of postcolonial political and cultural concerns that he championed in his life. To the writings of Edward Said, one could add the works of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak who were in a way responsible for providing a theoretical and much less readable framework.
Any critical theory which has "post" as its prefix is not easy to pin down, and its definition remains unsettled. Postcolonialism is no exception. Postcolonialism, as a term, has both historical and theoretical nuances. In one sense, as an expression, it marks the formal decline of Western territorial empires. On the other, as a theory, it has several functions: (a) it examines and explains especially social, cultural, and political conditions such as nationality, ethnicity, race, and gender both before and after colonialism; (b) it interrogates the often one-sided history of nations, cultures, and peoples; and (c) it engages in a critical revision of how the "other" is represented.
Postcolonialism is largely an intellectual and political pursuit and has unashamedly a committed stance. Unlike other theoretical categories, it is not too preoccupied with detachment and neutrality. It emerged from both indigenous and diasporic contexts. Its critical stance is a creative adoption of the practical insights gleaned from those involved in anti-colonial and neo-colonial struggles and the theoretical tools and perspectives gained from a wide variety of disciplines. This includes a combination of clashing and contradictory voices from literary theory, philology, psychology, anthropology, political science, and feminist studies, with a view to exposing the collusive nature of Western historiography and its hidden support for imperialism. It is an attempt to explore the often one-sided, exploitative, and collusive nature of academic scholarship.
Right from its inception, postcolonialism has functioned as a political indicator and a literary critical tool. One of the least troublesome ways to describe postcolonialism is to recall the words of John McLeod. For him, it is an exploration of "the inseparable relationship between history and culture in the primary context of colonialism and its consequences." To put it at its simplest: it is about the impact created by Western colonization on individuals, communities, and cultures. As with all theoretical practices, the purpose and serviceability of postcolonialism have changed over the years. In the initial stages Homi Bhabha, one of the triumvirate who were at the forefront in shaping the theory, wrote that the aim of postcolonialism was to
intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic "normality" to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent movements within the "rationalizations" of modernity.
A later definition brings out the larger agenda of postcolonialism which embraces political ideals of transnational social justice and its praxiological nature. Robert Young, who played a critical role in clarifying the field and even came up with a new term, "tricontinentalism," perceived postcolonialism as a theoretical and political position which not only "attacks the status quo of hegemonic economic imperialism, and the history of colonialism and imperialism, but also signals an active engagement with positive political positions and new forms of political identity in the same way as Marxism or feminism." The Marxism which Young refers to is the non-Western form which was developed to scrutinize the historical forms of imperialism, and similarly the feminism referred to by him includes the aims and practices of Third World feminism. Like most scholarly analysis, postcolonialism is about interrogating texts with certain kinds of question – in this case, those which come with colonial and neo-colonial history and experience. It is about disputing and confronting the after-effects of imperial and the new effects of neo-imperial control.
Concerns and Preoccupations
Postcolonialism is a cluster of disparate writings, and it would be helpful to herd together some of its key interrelated activities and themes which have evolved over the years and energized the field:
1 Investigating the social, cultural, and political impact of colonialism on individuals and indigenous cultures.
2 Reopening different genres of colonial archive in the form of historical documentation, novels, travel writings, and translations which both colluded with and confronted imperial interests in the building and maintaining of the empire. This involves revisiting the literary productions, rereading and reinterpreting them, and exposing the revisions or reinforcements of colonial or national history.
3 Recovering the resistance of the subjugated. This looks not only at the dynamics of colonial domination but also at the capacity of the colonized to resist, either openly or covertly.
4 Identifying postcolonial conditions caused by a set of historical, political, and cultural contingencies – migration, diaspora, refugees, internally displaced persons, and hyphenated identities. It studies the process and effects of cultural displacement on individuals and communities and the ways in which the displaced have defined and defended themselves.
5 Decentering universal and transhistorical values of Western categories of knowledge. It questions the three mainstays of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationalism, and universalism.
6 Transgressing the contrastive way of thinking. The binary categorizations include colonizer/colonized, center/margins, modern/traditional, and static/progressive. It queries the presences of such dualistic thinking, and applies deconstructive techniques to show that though the histories and orientations of colonized and colonizer are distinct, they overlap and intersect. It encourages productive crossings between the two.
7 Interrogating colonial and contemporary practices of representation of the "other" and the power relations that lie behind the production of such knowledge.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticismby R. S. Sugirtharajah Copyright © 2012 by R. S. Sugirtharajah. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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